I hear this like drumless krautrock and I think of trains and planes and automobiles and escalators moving people around in mechanical fashion. A lot of it seems wrapped up in a kind of autistic fascination with objects, textures, details of things, and the zen of everyday mundanities. Emeralds play with these gentle loops and tones that always sound just on the verge of coalescing into genuine melody, and as the video turns the old footage of track and field events over and over in its hands, examining the ways people contorted their bodies and flew through the air, the band does the same thing with their e-bows and arpeggiators. Kids’ TV shows used to do stuff like this—on “Mister Rogers” and “Sesame Street” if memory serves—where they’d show footage of people building bicycles or working at a facotry shaping a sheet of brass into a trumpet. The music that was played over these wordless segments was probably more like whimsical jazz or music-box plinks (like the softer side of Dan Deacon?), but it might as well have been “Candy Shoppe.”
